For nearly a decade a major battle has been waged over conditions in coke plants. While the steel industry has resisted clean-up efforts tooth and nail, the United Steel Workers of America (USWA), prodded by rank-and-file coke oven workers, has won definite improvements in conditions in coke plants. Still, most plants...
Tag - technology
The Star Wars series may be one of the last visual indulgences of this style of thinking. For we, as a society, are being confronted with our limitations. We feel the pinch of depleting resources and the occurrence of events like Three Mile Island and Love Canal have made some people realize that since we will be on...
One of the most significant by-products of the economic recession currently affecting almost all industrialized countries is that it has eclipsed much of the concern expressed at the beginning of the decade about the destructive impact of current patterns of technological growth. It is almost ten years since a set of...
As food and energy prices soar, they pose an immediate problem for the poor, who must worry about keeping warm and feeding themselves. As food products become more processed, synthetic and chemicalized, they pose a longer-term threat to the health of all economic classes. The less poor, those not immediately...
In the last few years, a sizeable movement has sprung up which criticizes the technology of the economically advanced countries, and which is trying to develop and build “alternative technologies”. The Magazine General Meeting (the bi-monthly meeting of the Boston Chapter to evaluate the magazine) urged that Science...
On July 25, 1973, the Brazilian President General Medici approved the "Basic Plan for Scientific and Technological Development" for the period 1973/1974. According to the Minister of Planning, "the main task of the Plan (PBDCT) is to have modern science and technology serve Brazilian society, in its objectives of...
Science and scientists have been described as instruments of development. Indeed they are. But they can also be used as instruments of underdevelopment and of neocolonial exploitation. The problems of increasing the production of food in underdeveloped countries have been laid in the lap of Science and Technology. But...
Unionization of engineers received its greatest impetus not during the Depression years but during the war years (1943-45). That is to say, it was not so much economic deprivation which led to large-scale unionization, but rather the monumental change brought about by their employment on a mass basis in large war...
The question of where to situate technical workers .in the class structure focuses on the debate over their relationship to blue-collar production workers. Are the interests of technical workers linked to those of wage workers in general? Or to those of management and capital? Or rather do they, together with all...
What is the role of technological aid to Third World liberation movements? What form of aid should progressive or radical groups advocate and support?